DUNDALK, Md. — Captain Jim Staples is a master mariner who spent nearly 40 years at sea, including 23 years as a captain on all types of vessels, including cargo ships. Now, he does consultant and investigative work for agencies ranging from the Department of Justice, to the NYPD's Counterterrorism Maritime Division.
He says losing power on a ship like the Dali happens more often than you hear about. It just doesn't usually end in a catastrophe.
"I've had things like this happen to me," Capt. Staples said.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said the data is consistent with a power failure, but investigators have not yet confirmed that.
Captain Staples says these ships do have emergency generators that kick in during a power outage, and the crews can still steer using an emergency gear.
"So, you know, if they were doing the correct thing, they should have already been in the emergency steering condition," he said.
WMAR-2 News Reporter Elizabeth Worthington asked, "So you imagine that if they weren't…that must mean that they couldn't?"
Staples said, "Right. So to me, they've had a complete failure on that vessel for power, including the emergency generator."
His best theory? The power outage stemmed from a mechanical problem. But what led to that problem, is up to the investigators to discover.
"We've got a ship that's coming into port that's had problems before, not just minor problems, some major problems, they've had other things, they've hit docks. So she's been in the line of fire for a long time with a lot of different problems, they're gonna have to do the research to find out why, you know, that could go back to being management structure of the company, the crews not getting what they need to do make mechanical fixes. And then it can be something as simple as a bad fuel, that they got some bad fuel, could be a problem like that. It could be human error, it could be somebody turned a wrong valve at the wrong time, or hit the wrong switch. You know, these are things that had happened to me before. If you go to sea for a long time, things are gonna happen.”
Despite passing U.S. Coast Guard inspection as recently as September 2023, the Dali has two past documented deficiencies. The most recent was reported in June 2023 when a faulty monitor gauge for fuel pressure was fixed before departing San Antonio, Chile. In July 2016, the Dali scraped a pier at the Antwerp Terminal in Belgium. The ship's hull was damaged causing its "seaworthiness" to be deemed impaired.
In September 2023, the ship passed inspection in New York with no issues identified.
WMAR-2 News asked Captain Staples if that inspection might have missed something. He says it's possible; inspections aren't as comprehensive as you might think.
"When they come down, and they inspect the vessel, I mean, you got a ship that's 1,000 feet long, and you've got three-four guys coming down to look at it in a short period of time. They're not going to catch things that they would have if this went through a thorough week-long, two week-long inspection. So it's it's very difficult to come nail that one little thing that may cause a ship to blackout. It's usually always after the fact is when we find something was wrong, and nobody realized," Captain Staples said.
"I mean, you've got a ship that's running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, every single day of the year for years. These things don't stop running. So I mean, anything can happen to any piece of equipment. It's like your vehicle, you know, one day it starts up, the next day, it doesn't, [...] And it could be someone installed something wrong; there's just a million different things that can go wrong."
This week, the NTSB presented a minute-by-minute timeline from when the Dali left the port, to when it struck the bridge, using information from the voyage data recorder (VDR) on board. The VDR is often compared to an airplane's black box, but the NTSB says it's much less comprehensive in the data it provides. But at some point, the VDR shut off, then came back on. There's two minutes of data missing.
"That's a mystery to me why that happened," Capt. Staples said. "You know, it could be the way the way it was wired. I don't know why that happened. But they do record, they continually record even when there's a problem. That's why you have VDR, it's not supposed to stop when you have a loss of power failure like that."
WMAR-2 News asked, "Well, that mystery is adding a lot of fuel to the fire in terms of the theories that are running around. A lot of people are wondering, is that evidence that this could have been a cyber attack someone hacking into the system? Is that at all possible?"
"I mean, anything's possible, but I don't I don't suspect that it's cyber like that. No, no, you hear all these these stories, you know, it was terrorism and all that kind of stuff. This was a marine incident. This was a marine accident, you know, they happen, and this one happened to be catastrophic."
Capt. Staples says getting to the root of the problem will entail looking at the VDR data that recorded communication between the pilots and the captain. The local pilots rely entirely on the captain to make them aware of any issues they're having before leaving the port.
"You've got a pilot who's coming on board the vessel; he's familiar with these types of ships, but he's not familiar with this exact ship, meaning that he may [have] never worked with this captain before. So when a pilot gets on board, he's going to have a master pilot exchange, and that's the exchange of information. And the captain should relinquish everything he feels safe to tell the captain, when it comes to the condition of the vessel. You know, is the vessel up and running? Have they had problems? This is information you should be passing on to the pilot so the pilot can make a good judgment, whether the ship is safe to go or not, because that's his main concern, he's getting on a ship that he may never have been around before. He wants to know if the ship is safe to be put to sea."
One problem Capt. Staples pointed to more generally, with crews around the world, is fatigue.
"When I started going to sea, we started with 42-man crews and the ships were half the size. And now we're down to a 20-man crew and the ships are bigger, faster, carry more cargo, and guys are tired. [...] And they come out with these nice regulations and rules. But if you don't have the manpower, you just can't do it. [...] The only way around it is to put more people on board ships. That's it - period. There is no other answer."
"So, I mean, that can be as simple as why this happened. Somebody was just tired, and they missed an important thing and putting something back together."
He says the public can rest assured that the NTSB will conduct a thorough investigation, exploring all possibilities.
"They want to find out why this happened. They want to make sure this never happens again."
Captain Staples credited the pilot for his quick-thinking in issuing the mayday call to the MDTA officers.
"To even think about doing that, when you're in a really, really catastrophic event going on, you're trying to figure out what's going on, to think about the safety of everybody that's crossing that bridge, that's amazing."
